The Jewess turned fiercely to face her questioner and in a tone of suppressed passion, exclaimed: "Jesus Christ is dead!" Poor Jessie trudged on, but soon a rude boy jostled against her, and snatching her basket from her hand, threw it into the street.
[Illustration]
Crying, she ran to pick it up. The horses of a passing street car trampled her under their feet—and she knew no more till she found herself stretched on a hospital bed.
When the doctors came that night, they knew she could not live until morning. In the middle of the night, after she had been lying very still for a long time, apparently asleep, she suddenly opened her eyes and the nurse, bending over her, heard her whisper, while her face lighted up with a smile that had some of heaven's own gladness in it: "Oh, Jesus, I have found you at last!"
Then the tiny lips were hushed, but the questioning spirit had received an answer.
—Selected.
"I'LL NEVER STEAL AGAIN—IF FATHER KILLS ME FOR IT"
A friend of mine, seeking for objects of charity, got into the room of a tenement house. It was vacant. He saw a ladder pushed through the ceiling. Thinking that perhaps some poor creature had crept up there, he climbed the ladder, drew himself up through the hole and found himself under the rafters. There was no light but that which came through a bull's-eye in the place of a tile. Soon he saw a heap of chips and shavings, and on them a boy about ten years old.
"Boy, what are you doing there?"
"Hush! don't tell anybody—please, sir."